EPISODE 52: BLACK HOLE

Beautiful women with tails, peeling out of your own skin, bad acid trips, cat-faced kids…we must be discussing the graphic novel Black Hole by Charles Burns.

This chilling book set in the Seattle area in the 1970s is the story of high schoolers who are sexually transmitting a mysterious “bug” that mutates their bodies. But despite all appearances, this isn’t sci-fi horror; instead, the book speaks more to the general longing and misery that is American adolescence.

And so, for the Bookshelf Revisit, the Disco trio pulls down their favorite teen-themed work of literature. A play set on Lover’s Leap, a book about a “maniac” runner, Richard Ford’s classic Rock Springs, and of course, Bruce Springsteen.

It’s all angst all the time. Your parents just don’t get you. But we do.